Those who have enough sense not to watch modern movies might not realize that:
Skynet is a fictional, self-aware artificial intelligence system which features centrally in the Terminator franchise and serves as the franchise’s main antagonist. Scarcely depicted visually in any of the Terminator media, Skynet’s operations are almost exclusively performed by war-machines, cyborgs (usually a Terminator), and other computer systems, with its ultimate goal the extinction of the human race.
See Skynet (Terminator) or watch the movie The Terminator if you care to know more. My bias is that something a little like Skynet is possible only because so many people watch this trash and take it seriously just as the criminal activities of gangsters inside the CIA and the Pentagon and the oil-companies and the investment banks and so forth became possible at high levels because people read, watched, and took seriously the James Bond trash as well as the whole genre of stuff out of the fevered imaginations of the likes of Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancey, and E. Howard Hunt—one of the men and authors we should not want to be influencing our views of reality.
On to the serious science article to which I’m responding: Simulated brain scores top test marks by the reliable and often insightful journalist of science, Ed Yong. I always read at least the introductory paragraphs of his weblog, Not Exactly Rocket Science, but don’t usually respond to them in my writings because he deals with general biological subjects of great interest to me but not bearing directly upon my work, though they do affect my general understanding of our world. This time, he did deal with such a subject: are we starting to create technological analogs of human minds?
In his article, Ed Yong tells us:
Spaun — the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network — is the brainchild of Chris Eliasmith, a theoretical neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, and his colleagues. It stands apart from other attempts to simulate a brain, such as the ambitious Blue Brain Project […], because it produces complex behaviours with fewer neurons. “Throwing a lot of neurons together and hoping something interesting emerges doesn’t seem like a plausible way of understanding something as sophisticated as the brain,” says Eliasmith.
“Until now, the race was who could get a human-sized brain simulation running, regardless of what behaviours and functions such simulation exhibits,” says Eugene Izhikevich, chairman of the Brain Corporation in San Diego, California, who helped to develop some of the first large-scale neuronal models — including one with 100 billion neurons. “From now on, the race is more [about] who can get the most biological functions and animal-like behaviours. So far, Spaun is the winner.”
He also tells us:
Spaun is almost as accurate at such simple tasks as the average human, and reproduces many quirks of human behaviour, such as the tendency to remember items at the start and end of a list better than those in the middle. “We weren’t surprised that it could do tasks,” says Eliasmith, ”but we were often surprised that subtle features like the time it took or the errors it made were the same as for humans”.
Don’t worry that Skynet is literally on its way. This is a very limited model of only a few types of behavior on the part of a few regions of the brain. The underlying computer program which perceives and moves a simple robotic arm isn’t capable of learning new tasks; it deals with only a few environmental signals presented in a somewhat artificial way. Yet, it’s interesting and also scary because of our moral irresponsibility and our tendency to use, say, drone technology to kill children in Afghanistan and Yemen rather than to monitor forests in danger of fires.
Spaun is the type of limited `thinking’ technology which might work well in a drone with a particular mission, one which is to recognize signs of forest fires or one which will kill human beings wandering hillsides in Asian countries. Let’s prepare ourselves for the likelihood that we’re still in a decades-long, maybe centuries-long, period when technological advances, such as Spaun, will be used to advance the interests of those who are not only hungry for power and wealth but also ruthless when it comes to the lives and livelihoods of we common folk. Let’s also consider the possibility that our technology may become part of us—we can pray only in a more benevolent form than killer drones: see Does the Body of Christ have non-human components? for a short discussion of the possibility that some technology might become truly part of us and our communities and thus part of the Body of Christ.